Final Words

Despite Haswell's arrival on the desktop, AMD is in no trouble at all from a graphics perspective. At the high end, Richland maintains a 17 - 50% GPU performance advantage (~30% on average) over Intel's HD 4600 (Haswell GT2). All things equal, even Trinity is good enough to maintain this performance advantage - a clear downside of Intel not bringing its Iris or Iris Pro graphics to any socketed desktop parts.

While there isn't a substantial increase in GPU performance between Richland and Trinity, AMD's GPU performance lead over Ivy Bridge was big enough to withstand Haswell's arrival. Note that although we're comparing performance to Haswell here, Richland exists in a lower price bracket. If you want the best desktop solution with processor graphics, AMD remains your best bet.

Later this year we'll see the arrival of Kaveri, which will be AMD's true response to Iris as well as its first HSA enabled APU. For as long as I can remember, integrated graphics was one of the most frustrating aspects of PC hardware to test. It looks like that's finally about to change.

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102 Comments

Indeed, there is a $468 part. You can still fit a decent dGPU and a decent CPU on that budget for, once again, vastly superior performance. And you don't need crossfire but you do lose on power consumption, which is the only point the Iris has for it.Reply

I wonder how much discount do OEM generally gets from Intel. 30% off Tray $440 @ $308/chip ? If the CPU used to cost them $200 and $100 for the GPU, i guess the space saving of 2in1 solution, less power usage, while giving similar performance is going to be attractive enough. Reply

Yah, for me, the only consideration for a system with on-die CPU graphics is if I buy a low-end notebook that I want to do a little gaming on, and the chips with Iris price themselves out of that market. I've recommended AMD for that kind of product to my friends before, and I don't see any reason to change that.Reply

No, Crystalwell also makes sense on any high-performance part. Be it the topmost dekstop K-series or the Xeons. That cache can add ~10% performance in quite a few applications, which equals 300 - 500 MHz more CPU clock. And at 300$ there'd easily be enough margin left for Intel. But no need to push such chips...Reply

As others have already pointed out it's not the "most important information" at all. Crystalwell isn't available on a regular desktop socket.

Most importantly though, that is also for a good reason: Who would buy it? At the price point of the Crystalwell equipped CPUs you would get hugely better gaming performance with an i3/i5/FX and a dedicated GPU. You can build an entire system from scratch for the same amount and game away with decent quality settings, often high - in full HD.

There is a point to make for HTPCs, gaming laptops/laplets, but i would assume that they don't sell a lot of them at the Crystalwell performance target.

Since the article is about Desktops however, and considering all of the above, Crystalwell is pretty irrelevant in this comparison. If you seek the info on Crystalwell performance i guess you will know where to find it.Reply